Most Recent Posts
War Tax Resister Claims IRS Regulation Violates Human Rights Treaty
Originally Published on forbes.com on September 4th, 2011 ______________________________________ People refuse or resist paying taxes for a variety of reasons. I think...
Stubborn People – Gotta Love Them
Originally Published on forbes.com on September 3rd, 2011 ______________________________________ Welcome to Collection One of my persistent themes is that there are two...
Can Obama End “Carried Interest” by Regulation? – Experts Start Weighing In
Originally Published on forbes.com on September 3rd, 2011 ______________________________________ I have speculated that President Obama is engaged in a phony war with...
Obama’s Phony War on Hedge Funds – View From the Far Left
Originally Published on forbes.com on September 2nd, 2011 ______________________________________ I love breaking my own rules. In my last post I said that people who...
Obama vs Hedge Funds – Is it a Real Fight or Professional Wrestling ?
Originally Published on forbes.com on September 1st, 2011 ______________________________________ President Obama jumps into the ring with a chair – a proposed Code...
Hurricane Irene Extends Some Deadlines – 1.5 Cheers from Tax Preparers
Originally Published on forbes.com on September 1st, 2011 ______________________________________ An IRS new release (IR-2011-87) announces that various deadline...
Whatcha Gonna Do When They Come for You? IRS CI Stepping Up its Act
Originally published on Forbes.com One of my persistent comments is that there are two distinct areas of tax practice – determination of the correct tax and...
Aggravation for Expatriate – Can Moving From Japan to New York Make You a Rhode Island Resident?
Originally Published on forbes.com on August 27th, 2011 ______________________________________ One of the most difficult things to grasp in state taxation is the...
Open Letter to Warren Buffett from a Prison Rape Survivor and Another Century
Originally Published on forbes.com on August 25th, 2011 ______________________________________ I asked my friend Tom Cahill to comment on the current discussion...
Did Warren Buffett Leave $675,000 of Tax Savings on the Table ?
This piece is really about tax planning, not Warren Buffett. When you have very charitable clients, you sometimes get odd results like this. Run the numbers. Don’t do them in your head. Test your assumptions. It’s not just charitable clients it’s anybody whose return has more than a couple of moving parts. Another planning principle is not letting the tail wag the dog. There may be compelling non-tax reasons for Mr. Buffett to be making, apparently only gifts of appreciated property rather than a combination of appreciated property and cash. Those reasons might be beyond my understanding. I had that skeletal return though. I just had to try. It’s how I was trained.